`Good Girls go to Heaven; Bad Girls...' Learn to be Good: Quizzes in American and Brazilian Teenage Girls' Magazines

Abstract

This article examines 15 quizzes in teenage girls' magazines: the American `Teen, Seventeen and Sassy, and the Brazilian Capricho, over the period 1994-5. It argues that the genre quiz, an apparently playful feature in these magazines, is not as harmless as it appears to be. In addition to encouraging girls towards self-scrutiny, quizzes work as `disciplinary instruments', aiming at the heterosexist socialization of teenage girls. Analysis of the macro-structure of the quizzes reveals a problem-solution structure is used to accomplish this. The producers of these texts judge, evaluate, and classify girls as either `good' or `bad', and tend to prescribe and proscribe types of behavior from a heterosexist perspective. The high informality and ludic appearance of quizzes, therefore, disguise what seems to be an important agenda: to discipline girls to be `good'.